Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

Whenever it snows these days, there will always be an eco-miserabilist at hand to tell us it is our fault – that freakish wintery weather is as much "manmade" as is hot weather and droughts. And so the Independent, having told us in March 2000 that, as a result of climate change, "snow is starting to disappear from our lives", now tells us that, as a result of climate change, snow will become a more regular feature in our lives. Under the headline "Science behind the big freeze: is climate change bringing the Arctic to Europe?", the Indie says the reason we're all freezing is because manmade global warming caused "a dramatic loss of sea ice" in the Arctic, generating "a chill Arctic wind [which] has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week".

In short, it is your fault and my fault and everybody's fault that it has become so chilly recently. Our wicked antics, our carbon-emitting lifestyles, brought this Siberian winter upon Europe and killed all those homeless and old people. I wonder if environmentalists ever stop to think how much they sound like the witch-hunters of yesteryear? Because however radical Greens think they are, the truth is that this isn't the first time in history there has been a fashion for blaming long or dark or weird winters on foul individuals and their apparently problematic lifestyles. No, the sixteenth-century hunters of evil witches did likewise, pinning the blame for cold weather on sinning mankind long before the Independent and other modern Greens had the same idea.

One of the key mad beliefs behind witch-hunting in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries was the idea that these peculiar creatures had warped the weather, that they had caused "climate change". As the German historian Wolfgang Behringer argued in his 2004 book, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, "large-scale persecutions were clearly linked to years of extreme hardship and in particular the type of misery related to extreme climatic events". During the Little Ice Age, the period of unusual coldness that kicked off in the mid-1500s, there was an upsurge in witch-hunting. There was another outburst in 1628, described by historians as "the year without a summer", because once again people's crops failed as a result of very cold weather and they were desperate to find someone to blame – usually a cranky old woman who could be labelled a "witch".

As Behringer says, when the "climate stayed unfavourable or 'unnatural' the demand for persecutions persisted". That is, whenever there was extreme coldness the hunt would start for someone evil to hold responsible. Johann Weyer, the sixteenth-century physicist who publicly opposed witch-hunting, described how one woman was forced to confess to causing climate change. A "poor old woman was driven by torture to confess – as she was about to be offered to Vulcan's flames – that she had caused the incredible severity of the previous winter of 1565, and the extreme cold, and the lasting ice". That old dear was clearly a very early victim of mankind's climate-change hysteria.

Blaming man for causing today's freezing conditions across Europe, and branding as an "idiot" anyone who calls this thesis into question, is a modern-day, more PC and less violent version of what those witch-hunters did to little old ladies suspected of "causing the extreme cold and lasting ice". For all its scientific pretensions, contemporary Green hysteria actually speaks to an age-old human discomfort with change, especially unpredicted change, and to a deep authoritarian instinct to blame natural calamities on mystical or magical or plain destructive human beings. Let's just be thankful that contemporary eco-witchfinders lack the authority to hurl people into "Vulcan's flames".